As early as 10,000 BC, small groups of hunters and gatherers lived in caves by the great inland sea, prehistoric Lake Bonneville. This desert culture was replaced about AD 400 by the more advanced Pueblo, or Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi), culture, which came into Utah from what is now the Southwest and Mexico. These Indians constructed superb communal cliff dwellings and raised corn (maize), squash, and beans. They left Utah about 1250, perhaps because of an extended drought.

When white explorers and settlers came to Utah in the 18th and 19th centuries, they encountered Shoshone Indians—the Southern Paiute, Gosiute, and Ute—some of whom raised corn and pumpkins by irrigation. The Ute in eastern Utah lived in a region of higher rainfall; having acquired horses from Plains Indians, their nomadic life centred around the buffalo.

Two Franciscan fathers, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, explored Utah in 1776, and afterward Utah was visited by occasional Spanish trading parties. Fur trappers and immigrants to California and Oregon were in the region in the 1820s and ’30s. The first four of some 16 annual rendezvous between trappers and buyers were held in Utah from 1825 to 1828, indicating the early importance of the area to the fur trade. The “mountain men” who explored and established trading posts included James Bridger, who first visited the Great Salt Lake in 1824, and Jedediah Smith, who first traversed the state from north to south and west to east in 1826–27. Explorers sent by the government included John C. Frémont, who led expeditions to northern Utah in 1843 and the western Great Salt Lake area in 1845.

Mormon settlement and territorial growth

The period of settlement and territorial status is notable for the ending of the quest (1845–47) for a Mormon homeland, wrestling with an arid environment, the contest for sovereignty between Utah and the United States, and the conflict with indigenous Indians over the use of the land.

When wagonloads of Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young first entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847, they were determined to transform the arid valley land into a green and wholesome “kingdom of God.” From Salt Lake City (until 1868 called Great Salt Lake City) settlers were directed to colonize in all directions until they had developed a prosperous and stable economy and political structure in a territory that was originally 210,000 square miles in area, stretching from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada and from the Columbia River in Oregon to the Gila in Arizona. Immigrant converts continued to stream into Utah from Europe and the eastern United States; they were organized into colonizing parties based on allocations of skills and leadership abilities and sent out to build the territory. By 1860 more than 150 self-sustaining communities with a total of 40,000 residents had been established, irrigating crops with water from mountain streams carried through canals to the alluvial valley lands. Utah’s place in the national scene was symbolized by the driving of the golden spike at Promontory in 1869, uniting the eastward- and westward-reaching lines of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.

Conflict with the Indians was held to a minimum until the colonizers became more and more ubiquitous and local Indians began to raid the settlements. The Ute were eventually placed on a reservation in the Uinta Basin, the Southern Paiute and Shoshone on smaller reservations, and later the lands south of the San Juan River were incorporated into the Navajo Reservation.

The propensity of the Mormons to establish their own political and social system and the incompetency of federal territorial officials led to an era of conflict with the federal government. In 1857 President James Buchanan, believing the Mormons to be in a state of open rebellion, ordered some 2,500 soldiers to Utah to replace Young, who had served as governor during the early years. This episode is referred to as the Utah War, although no armed clashes occurred. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, a new camp was established east of Salt Lake City under the command of Colonel Patrick Connor. Connor openly supported his troops in prospecting for minerals and sought to “solve the Mormon problem” by initiating a miners’ rush to Utah. A substantial enclave of non-Mormon miners, freighters, bankers, and businessmen arrived, and there ensued three decades of conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons.

Before and after statehood

The Mormon settlers applied for statehood in 1849 under the name Deseret, a word from the sacred Book of Mormon meaning “honeybee” and signifying industry. This bid was rejected, as were the efforts of five subsequent constitutional conventions between 1856 and 1887. Before the U.S. Congress and the national administration would assent to statehood for Utah, Mormon leaders were required to discontinue the church’s involvement in politics through its People’s Party, withdraw from an economic policy in which Mormons dealt primarily with each other, and discontinue the practice of polygamy.

After its acceptance into the Union in 1896, Utah moved rapidly into the mainstream of the nation. The political structure changed from theocracy to a conventional democracy: non-Mormons were elected to important positions, including the office of governor. The Mormon church has been officially neutral in politics since the early 1900s, and the influence of economic blocs has become far more important. That Utah’s traditional spirit of community-mindedness survives was illustrated by the thousands who joined, on short notice, to counteract the devastation of heavy spring flooding in Salt Lake City in 1983.